


all your heroes (die all alone)

by Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails



Series: bury your heroes [1]
Category: Incredibles (Pixar Movies)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, And angst, Angst, Bad Jokes, Bisexual Violet Parr, Blanket Permission, Depression, Drinking, Dysfunctional Family, Hey, Implied/Referenced Bob "Mr. Incredible" Parr/Helen "Elastigirl" Parr/Stratogale, Memory Loss, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Minor Bob "Mr. Incredible" Parr/Helen "Elastigirl" Parr, Minor Kari McKeen/Violet Parr, Minor Lucius "Frozone" Best/Honey Best, Podfic Welcome, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, and other fun things like that, but then I thought, i don't think that any of the archive warnings apply but still maybe use caution?, i was gonna let them be happy, in more than one sense, listen, listen bob isn't getting off easy here and neither is anybody else, make it a tag cowards, no beta we die like violet's dreams for life, so you get this instead, what if we gave everyone trauma, where's the fun in that, y'all ever see a really cute happy family friendly movie and think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:35:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26214958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails/pseuds/Ink_Beneath_Her_Fingernails
Summary: “I sent my son off to war, and they gave me back a superhero,” her grandma tells her, laying one mangled old hand over her own.Violet looks at her, long and hard, and then stares down at her hands, long ago broken beyond repair, shattered past saving by a son who didn’t know his own strength outside of a battlefield and just wanted to see his mother again, and wonders if she considers the man she sent away and the man she got back the same person.(Or: Supers were created during World War II, and the Parr family still bear the scars of it.)
Relationships: Bob "Mr. Incredible" Parr & Violet Parr, Dash Parr & Violet Parr, Helen "Elastigirl" Parr & Violet Parr, Kari McKeen & Violet Parr, Lucius "Frozone" Best & Violet Parr
Series: bury your heroes [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1903894
Comments: 4
Kudos: 43





	all your heroes (die all alone)

**Author's Note:**

> **TW:** drinking, mentioned/discussed/heavily implied depression, mentioned/discussed/heavily implied PTSD, suicidal thoughts, broken bones, accidental injuries, jokes that are in extremely poor taste (about death and suicide), memory wiping/memory loss/alteration, vomiting, mentions/discussions of violence, mentions/discussions of gore, mentions/discussions of war, mentions/discussions of death, mentions/discussions/implications of killing/murder/assassination
> 
> **Please let me know if there are any other warnings you think I should add.**
> 
> Alternative titles:
> 
> \- Parr for the Course  
> \- a fisherman’s tale  
> \- Violets Are Blue  
> \- where ghosts go  
> \- bury you alive (shovel your way out)  
> \- grab your sword (don your armor)  
> \- bleed your despair (bury you alive)  
> \- no heroes left  
> \- bleed your despair (unforgiving earth)  
> \- the only hero here (is you)  
> \- bury your heroes

i. Their last name has not always been _Parr_ , and Violet has not always known _why_.

Dad is just swinging her around by her hands, like all the other fathers do with their kids, and they are going faster and faster and _faster_ until all of a sudden Violet starts to slip and he panics and grabs her just a little _too tight_ and little five-year-old Violet’s _wrist_ is _broken._

A lot of things happen after that, and she doesn’t get some of them.

Dad shouts and she thinks she sees tears in his eyes when he puts her down and drops to his knees to try to get a better look at the damage, but it _hurts so badly_ she can’t really be sure.

Mom comes out and sees what happens and Dad explains it to her in a rush, words tripping over themselves until they’re nothing more than soup, but Mom has known Dad for a long time, and she can pick out what happened from the fuzz.

Mom and Dad talk in low rushes voices, and then Mom sends Dad back inside and gives Violet a big, big hug, and takes her into the car.

While she’s driving, she explains things, and this is where Violet stops understanding.

She doesn’t understand why Mom tells her that Violet can’t tell anybody what happened, doesn’t understand when she’s told that Dad's strength isn’t _normal_ and it needs to be kept secret.

The nurse narrows her eyes and purses her lips when Violet says she fell out of a tree instead.

Mom never has to put Dad in the doghouse because he does that on his own, pale as a sheet whenever he sees his daughter, flitting around her like a ghost for the next three whole weeks, drifting out of rooms when she walks in and fluttering nervously like he’s afraid to touch her again, afraid to get too close. (It is odd, she thinks, to see a man his size act so skittish.)

There’s a lot of calls to Grandma those three weeks, and when she comes to visit, she has an old, old cast slipped over her twisted hand, and holds it out to Violet and says “Look, now we match,” with a smile that cracks around the edges.

Eventually, the nurses and doctor they see pretend they believe the story about the tree.

(It doesn’t matter. Five months later, Bob sets his coffee mug down on his desk at work hard enough to crack the wooden construct straight down the middle, and their family is quickly ushered far, far away, to a place they can start over, with new names for the parents and a new last name for all of them.

This is the first time the family is relocated.

It is not the last.)

ii. When Violet's parents discover that she has powers, they don't look curious or happy or excited.

They look _terrified_.

"We could take her to Dicker. He's the one who trained all of us, after all," she hears her father say when her parents are having a Talk (with a capital 't' and everything) in their room that night.

She hears footsteps, fading, and coming closer.

He's pacing again. He does that, when he's nervous.

Her mother makes a noise of frustration.

"That's the whole _point_ , Bob. Dicker _trained us_. He's not gonna know any better than us how to go about this without turning her into—into— _you know_. No, we have to do this on her own."

The whole time, she wonders why her parents seem to hate Uncle Rick so much whenever they think the kids aren't listening.

iii. When Violet is seven, Uncle Lucius, Aunt Honey, and Aunt Gail come over for dinner one night, and the adults all drink a little afterward.

Violet slips past the living room and into the kitchen at eleven o’clock at night for a glass of water, and starts straining to hear their conversation without even consciously meaning to.

“Didja—didja hear the one about the screenwriter who passed away?” Aunt Gail giggles. “He was giving elevator pitches and the elevator got stuck halfway.”

“Yeah,” Dad drawls. “And I bet he ended up eating smooshed sandwiches they pushed through a crack in the door and repeating the same crappy screenplay idea about talking dogs until his last day, right?”

The rest of them chuckle, something about it sounding dazed, and Uncle Lucius speaks up, breathing heavily as his laughs peter out.

“I’ve—I’ve got one. You hear that one about the fisherman who passed? He didn’t jump off that ledge, he just stepped out into the air and pulled the ground up towards him really fast, like—like he was pitching a line and went fishing for concrete.”

And all of a sudden, there’s a burst of noise, and it takes Violet a moment to realize that it’s the sound of every adult in the room bursting into raucous laughter.

They are _laughing_ and _laughing_ and Violet _doesn’t get it_ , doesn’t understand the joke, because that’s not _funny_ , it doesn’t even make _sense_.

(Until years later, when suddenly it does, but she still _doesn’t get it_ because it’s still _not funny_ , _nothing_ about that is _funny_ why are they _laughing_ —)

iv. Helen doesn’t like to hug them, Violet knows.

Oh, she _does_ hug them, but she doesn’t _like_ it.

It’s been years, but she still tenses whenever someone wraps their arms around her, still holds her breath.

She always hugs them in an odd way, so her hands come to rest on the shoulders they’re closest to, without ever wrapping around their backs.

Violet wonders what she’s done, to have such a fear of something so normal instilled in her, wonders if she’s hugged people before and gotten a knife in the back, wonders if her arms have wrapped around someone and kept wrapping and wrapping and _squeezing_ , if she’s kept going until their ribs started to crack, if she ignored it when they coughed up blood and gasped for her to _stop, God, please stop_ , if she tied knots around their necks and _pulled_ until they couldn’t remember what it felt like to _breathe_ anymore, wonders if she’s scared that if she reaches any further when she hugs them now, she’ll end up doing the same thing, to one of her own _kids_.

Her father doesn’t like giving hugs, either, but unlike her mother, he doesn’t dare risk it, doesn’t hold them or pick them up or touch them at all except for the moments when he most forgets himself, is too caught up in excitement or emotion to hold himself back—moments where Violet knows, he is at his most dangerous, simply because that is the furthest thing from his mind.

The problem isn’t that he doesn’t know his own strength, Violet thinks.

The problem is that he _does_ , so well, so intimately, has ripped soldiers limb from limb in a way that was all too literal, has crushed skulls beneath his hands, has splintered lives apart without even thinking about it.

He never really considered that he would have the same problem with civilian life, in the beginning, Violet’s figured, like any problems with it he’d come across in their downtime from the field would just magically _go away_ because he was home, but ever since incidents like the ones with Grandma and then with Violet herself when she was younger, he doesn’t _dare_.

Other couples, other parents, they shower each other with affection—holding hands, hugging, rubbing each other’s backs or shoulders, kisses dropped on lips, cheeks, noses, foreheads.

Not Violet’s parents.

Like with their kids, they never seem to come into direct contact with one another.

She goes over to a friend’s house and sees a picture from their parents’ wedding on the mantle, their father with an arm curled around their mother’s waist, one hand pressed to the small of her back, and their mother with her arms thrown around his neck as they kiss.

She goes home and sees a picture from her own parents’ wedding.

Years younger, they stand at the altar next to each other, sides almost touching as they face the camera, two pillars of immeasurable strength, utterly separate.

She wonders if Dash has caught on yet, to the fact that this isn’t normal, has caught on to the _why_.

She wonders if he ever will, when their parents don’t even seem to be fully aware of these habits of theirs themselves.

v. It’s surreal, sometimes, to be walking through an antique shop, or a bookstore, and see her father’s masked face on the covers of old comic books, carrying injured soldiers over his shoulders, or punching Nazis.

It’s strange, too, when they go over supers in history class, whenever they talk about World War II, and hear names of people she knows—or their alter-egos, at least.

Aunt Gail, who isn't really her aunt at all (and who she is fairly certain had had at least a fling with Violet’s mother—maybe both her parents—at one point or another, but more like whatever the emotional version of a fling is supposed to be—not that anyone would ever _ask_ them about something like that, not that they would ever _admit_ to something like that).

Uncle Lucius, her father’s brother in all but blood (older than him by two years, but looking younger than him by five, the ice they all but injected into his veins slowing everything, and he watches as all his old friends start to wither but cannot join them any faster).

Mom.

Dad.

Anca. Scott. Lon’Yea. Santi. Simon. Tristan. Mihai.

Stratogale. Frozone. Elastigirl. Mr. Incredible. Apogee. Tradewind. Plasmabolt. Phylange. Gazerbeam. Macroburst. Hyper Shock.

And, of course, Gamma Jack. (The one super she is sure that history will never, ever forget.)

vi. “I sent my son off to war, and they gave me back a superhero,” her grandma tells her, laying one mangled old hand over her own.

She’s smiling, and the tone she’s trying for is a happy one, but her eyes are suspiciously wet and her voice trembles and cracks like she’s about to sob or maybe scream.

Violet looks at her, long and hard, and then stares down at her hands, long ago broken beyond repair, shattered past saving by a son who didn’t know his own strength outside of a battlefield and just wanted to see his mother again, and wonders if she considers the man she sent away and the man she got back the same person.

vii. They’re covering World War II in school again.

“The supers weren’t soldiers,” her teacher says, and she furrows his brow, wondering for a second what he means, before he continues, “They were tools, weapons.”

She thinks about her parents.

_Supers aren’t soldiers, they’re weapons._

But her parents are _people_ , and she doesn’t know how to feel about that.

viii. “Kari?” She approaches the other girl at school on Monday, after several long days off for the whole family to try to figure things out again and get their shit together. (She’s not holding her breath.)

Kari leans back to peer at her from around the door of her locker, blinking at her.

“Sorry it took so long, but I have your money. I really can’t thank you enough for watching Jack-Jack for us. We would’ve gotten it to you right away, but there’s just been so much going on, and—and–” Kari’s just staring at her, bewildered, none of her usual brace-face, happy-go-lucky grin, and Violet stutters to a stop when she notices, something inside her feeling deeply unsettled at the change. “Kari?” She asks again, hesitantly.

“Uh,” Kari looks around, as if maybe she’s talking to someone else, or somebody will save her from the situation, completely ignoring the bills Violet’s holding out to her. “Do we–” She looks back at Violet, and not an ounce of recognition crosses her features. “Do we know each other?”

Violet inhales sharply, and a pit of dread forms in her stomach.

Do they _know_ each other?

Kari is one of Violet’s only friends, and the same can be said in reverse.

No, scratch that, Kari is Violet’s _best_ friend.

They sit together in algebra. They study together after school. Sometimes, on the weekends, they go bowling. They’ve known each other since the seventh grade. Kari babysits Jack-Jack and sometimes Dash when everyone else is occupied. She’s one of the only people Violet can _speak_ to, can maintain some modicum of _normalcy_ with, can actually voice her thoughts somewhat freely in front of, doesn’t have to watch her steps around and make sure she’s just-this-side of average, not strange and not lacking and not advanced and not any of the things she may or may not have been able to be if she was really ever _allowed_ to _be_.

Kari is _Kari_.

She keeps her sane, and Violet thanks her lucky stars for her just about every single day.

Yes, they know each other.

“No,” Violet says, coming to a decision quickly, and the lie tastes like ash on her tongue. Her eyes burn and she is suddenly very aware of just how hard it can be to hold back tears. She feels like she’s going to throw up. “We don’t know each other. Sorry—I must’ve just—you look like—I thought you were someone else. Sorry.”

Kari gives her an odd look as the hand that's holding out the ginger’s payment falls limp at her side, and she fights to swallow around the lump in her throat. ( _How didn’t she see this coming before she should’ve known she should’ve known she should’ve known–_ )

“Sorry,” she says again, and it comes out a pathetic croak even to her own ears.

Kari furrows her eyebrows, and then she shrugs.

“Not a problem. Hey, good luck finding whoever you were looking for,” she tells her, as if she has no idea that Violet’s known her for years and years and she’s the only person Violet’s ever told half her secrets to and sometimes she thinks that maybe she’s halfway in love with her even though she _shouldn’t_ be.

And then Kari closes her locker and walks away, a half-hearted wave thrown over her shoulder.

“Sorry,” Violet whispers, over and over and over again until the redhead’s out of sight, until the bell rings, until she’s the only one in the hall and her back is meeting the locker bank very hard very suddenly and she is sliding down it to the floor trying to figure out how to _breathe_ again.

“I’m sorry, Kari,” she gasps, like that’ll make it any better.

(It doesn’t.)

ix. “Mom. Dad,” she says haltingly during dinner, staring at her plate to avoid having to look at anyone, because she’s not quite sure if she can handle that right now. She hasn’t touched her food. It’s chicken cacciatore, her favorite, but looking at it right now makes her feel physically sick and she thinks that she may never again be able to associate it with anything other than the question she’s about to ask.

She hears more than sees them look up from their own food, before her mom prompts her forward again.

“Yes, sweetie?”

Violet swallows thickly, the knot in her chest only seeming to get denser with every passing second.

“Kari saw what happened,” she whispers. “What does that mean for her?”

She still doesn’t look up, but she can feel the way they exchange a look, the pause before they answer weighted with something she doesn’t dare try to unravel.

Dash has stopped kicking his feet, going unnaturally still and silent, and he knows just as well as she does that the answer isn’t going to be good, but he doesn’t _know_ , can’t possibly _understand–_

“Nothing,” her mother says after that horribly, horribly long moment. Her voice is carefully even, and when Violet glances up, both her parents are looking down at their plates again, sawing away at their chicken, faces blank. “Your Uncle Rick already had a talk with her.”

Violet looks back at her own plate, trying to fit the words _Uncle Rick_ and _Kari_ and _talk_ together in her head until they make sense, and for another long, long moment, none of them speak.

Then, Violet slowly pushes her chair back, stands up, and leaves the room on feet as steady as she can manage.

When she’s heaving her guts out in the bathroom moments later, she’s under no illusion that they can’t hear her, but they leave her alone anyway.

x. “Is it wrong?” Uncle Lucius asks her when she is sixteen and fresh off her first date and he has just found out that Honey is pregnant after so many years of trying. He’d come over to give the Parrs the news and share a celebratory drink with Bob, that turned into two drinks, three, too many, like they always do, but the others have long since drifted to sleep, and his happiness seems to have died out with them.

“Is it wrong that I don’t want her to be pregnant? That I’m scared I’ll outlive my own kid?” He turns to look at her, something frightened in his eyes. “Is it wrong that I promised myself that if I lived to see Jack-Jack have grandkids, I’d go fishing for concrete?” ( _Did you hear the one about the fisherman that passed? He didn’t jump off that ledge he j—_ )

And, well, she doesn’t have anything to say to that, so she doesn’t say anything at all.

She looks at him—at his face, his too-young face.

He could be a college student. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think he was.

He only looks a few years older than her.

He's forty-four.

_He’s been drinking_ , she thinks. _I shouldn’t listen to this. It’s not for me to hear._

“Honey’s gonna die,” he whimpers, and a few stray tears fall from his eyes. “Honey’s gonna die, and I won’t be able to do anything. She’s gonna die and I’ll still _be here_.”

_I should go._ She doesn’t.

“The ice won’t fucking let me _go_.”

What she does instead is walk around the couch to sit on the coffee table.

“It’s alright, Uncle Lucius,” she tells him in her best calm voice, and sets a comforting hand on the knee of the man who had begun to sob in earnest.

One shaking hand drifts away from his face towards her, and she grasps it in her own.

It's cold to the touch.

If she concentrates hard enough, she can feel his pulse—racing for him, almost beating at a normal rate with how much distress he's in.

“Honey’s fine.”

She doesn’t say she _will be fine_ because she’s thought about this, too, before—once, twice—and the truth is, none of them are really sure if or when Uncle Lucius is going to die.

Honey will always be aging and he will never be able to catch up.

“The ice can’t get you. You’re okay.”

She tells him all the platitudes that she can think of, but can’t bring herself to lie to him, can’t say that he’ll always have them, that he isn’t going to have to bury his wife, his kid, Bob, Helen, _her_ , until he buries everyone and there is no one left to bury _him_ ; can’t quite bring herself to tell him that he has nothing to worry about.

She just sits with him, in the dark living room, her father snoring away on the armchair, for what must be hours, and he doesn’t stop crying, but he does fall asleep, so she leans him over and pulls his legs up on the couch and covers him with a blanket even though he doesn’t need it, and puts a hand over his forehead as if in comfort and says, “It’s alright,” one last time before she leaves.

(It isn’t.

It’s the one lie she’s told him all night.)

xi. Her father looks sad, some days.

Others, he looks like he doesn’t feel anything at all.

All of those days are just the ones where he’s able to get out of bed.

She hears him talking, sometimes, to her mother, her grandmother, photographs, the walls, wondering about how you would _think_ that somebody who could catch a _tank_ would be able to _catch a god damn bullet for once._

When she heard that sort of thing when she was younger, she’d get confused. Tanks were big, but they were slow, and bullets were fast, and even Violet knew that.

“Your power isn’t super _speed_ , Daddy, it’s super _strength_ ,” she’d giggle, as if he was real silly for ever having to ask that, as if he’d meant those words for others to hear. (And the way he’d look at her is burned into her memories, that blank face, those eyes so dead, like the only thing there was a soft sort of pleading to feel _something_ and the vague realization that he didn’t _want_ to and didn’t _care_ that he _wasn’t_.)

Now, though, she understands, a bit; he didn’t mean it in the same way.

(Sometimes, when she’s feeling particularly vicious, she considers telling him that it’s because he hasn’t been _trying_ to ever since he got back from the field. Sometimes, she thinks about giving voice to the idea that _obviously_ he doesn’t _want_ it that bad, if he thinks he’s stuck now just because there’s no one else willing to point a gun at him, that he could do it himself, if he really did want it that much; that he could be like the fisherman. Sometimes, she wants to tell him that he’s a _coward_.

Sometimes, she is very, very scared of herself.)

(And on his more apathetic days, she does the talking for him at dinner, knowing that whether he just wants silence at the moment, or doesn’t care much at all, she will protect Dash and Jack-Jack from noticing how broken their parents have become for as long as humanly possible. She’s the oldest, and once upon a time, she was the youngest, and had had to figure these things out for herself and live with them, and _damned_ if she lets that happen to her little brothers. She’s the oldest. It’s her _job_.)

(Her mother goes job-searching when another office drops him after too many missed days. Violet doesn’t miss the way she only ever pulls out the _Help Wanted_ section when she thinks all the kids are in bed.)

(Some days she wonders if all supers are this fucked up, or just the ones who survived.)

xii. It’s Dash’s first high school track and field meet as a varsity competitor and the look on his face when he realizes that her and Jack-Jack are the only ones there _breaks_ her fucking _heart_.

This has been on the calendar for days, weeks, and Dash hasn’t stopped talking about it for even longer than that, ever since they found out he’d actually made varsity this year, but. _But._

There are some things that don’t care if you have events to attend or a schedule to keep, some things that are impossible to plan around.

It’s a Bad Day. The third in a row.

Her father is at home trying to find the motivation to move at all and her mother is right there beside him, trying to get him to _eat, please Bob, it’s been three days you need to eat think about the kids—_

But Violet is there, and she brings Jack-Jack with her, and the two of them can spout enough cheering and pep talks and good luck wishes and praise to make Dash completely forget why he’d been disappointed in the first place, so she grits her teeth and tries to fight down the sadness stirring in her own chest, along with something bitter, something too uncomfortably close to anger that she has no way to justify, tries to remind herself that her parents can’t help it sometimes, are just doing their best, and whoops every time he gets ready to have a go at his events. (Not _running_ events, not anymore—at least not as his focus, because he can't avoid it entirely, especially in this sport, because Dash is stupidly set on it for some reason and won't just choose another one. Dash would draw too much attention there, either from being way too good or not nearly good enough, or would learn to don the title _average_ like a second skin, slipping into the middle ranks and vanishing for good, would learn that he wasn’t _allowed_ to go all out, wasn’t _allowed_ to work hard, wasn’t _allowed_ to try his best, and wasn’t allowed to do any of the _opposite_ , would begin to look at the world through a new lens with these limitations, would start becoming like _Violet_ and that is the _last thing she wants._

They find things that he can _work at_ , where he can put himself forward and _learn_ and _work_ and be _proud_ of what he accomplishes, even if it’s not all that much, and his failures could be their own, where there is none of the same risk and he didn’t have to be afraid of _doing good_ , or even worse, _feeling good_ about it.

They find events where he can grow and shine in a fair manner, of his own volition and work rather than an ability he’d had no control over getting to begin with and others had no hope to match—events where Dash Parr can rise to the top without taking her little brother with him.

No, no running events. They aren’t _stupid_.)

(On most days, her father can carry them all on two fingers and her mother can catch them no matter how they fall, but on days they cannot, Violet will carry their patchwork little family on her own shoulders, and she will not stumble, she will not fall.)

**Author's Note:**

> *WWII technically got its name before it even started, in 1919, though I don't think it became popularized or commonly used until starting in 1939? Point is, during the time the films are set, it would be called WWII.
> 
> **Catch me very unsubtly slipping in references to _Tiny Glowing Screens, Part 2_ by Watsky
> 
> ***Elevators were invented in 1857, so they could feasibly make jokes about them
> 
> This whole fic is just... a mess tbh so... sorry about that ig. It feels hella unfinished, but I don't have much more to add, really? So I'm just throwing this out into the void in its as-done-as-it's-going-to-get state, really
> 
> I wrote this mainly bc I got stuck on the fact that the Incredibles is set during the time that it is and the implications of that and was shocked to find that virtually nobody has taken advantage of that yet
> 
> I have a whole (not very coherent or impressive tbh) thing about the Incredibles timeline and how this isn't _technically_ an au, or at least isn't very much of one, but I couldn't fit it in the notes, but if anyone's interested I can post it somewhere. ...It also includes why I put the thing about Gamma Jack in there...
> 
>   
> [come yell at me on tumblr :)](https://ink-beneath-her-fingernails.tumblr.com/)


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